1Week 1. IntroductionCAS LX 400Second Language AcquisitionSecond Language Acquisition• A person’s native language (L1 or NL) is thelanguage s/he learned first, as a child growing up.• A person’s second language (L2) is a languagelearned after L1 (includes third, fifth, …)• Second Language Acquisition (SLA or L2A) isconcerned with studying how people learn an L2.Why study L2A?• LinguisticsL2A is a component of the broader study ofthe uniquely human faculty for language.• Language pedagogyDesigning effective teaching methodologies;assessing reasonable expectations.• Language policyBilingual education, language laws, …What is L2A?• Consider:– What is the goal state of L2A?– What actually happens?• Is a second language learner trying to wind upwith the same knowledge that a native speakerhas?• Do they get there? Do they learn something else?What do they learn (in either case)? How? In whatorder? What helps, what doesn’t help?What needs to be learned?• If we’re studying how L2A proceeds, weshould have some idea what needs to belearned.• Simply speaking, one needs to learn“grammar” and the “lexicon”, but what isthe grammar?• How do we characterize the knowledge thatspeakers have of language?Why this is potentially difficult• The knowledge we have of language (at least ournative language) is largely unconscious.• Very young children can form complexconstructions; e.g., I want the toy that that boy isplaying with. But they couldn’t tell you it’s arelative clause, and they couldn’t even tell youwhat makes something a possible relative clausevs. an impossible relative clause.• We can only study this knowledge from theoutside.2Knowledge of language• We’ll spend some time looking at some propertiesof native speaker knowledge of English (nativespeaker knowledge of other languages is similar).• Some questions we will want to consider:– What bearing does this have on L2A?– Is a person’s knowledge of a second language the samekind of knowledge as a native speaker’s knowledge oftheir first language?– What differentiates L1A from L2A?Language is (surprisingly?)complicated…1) Tony threw out the couch.2) Tony threw the couch out. Prepositions can go on eitherside of the object.3) Tony stormed out the door.4) * Tony stormed the door out.…and yet it turns out that peopleknow all of this…5) What did Mary say John bought?6) What did Mary say that John bought? Ok, that is optional.7) Who did Mary say bought coffee?8) *Who did Mary say that bought coffee?Speakers of English know…9) Bill thinks Mary is a genius.10) Her mother thinks Mary is a genius.11) She thinks Mary is a genius.12) I asked Mary to buy coffee.13) What did you ask Mary to buy?14) I saw the book about aliens on the table.15) *What did you see the book about on the table?Prescriptive vs. descriptive• This is a different kind of knowledge from the sort ofrule that we learned in school, like:– Prepositions are things you don’t end a sentence with.• (“This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put” is WinstonChurchill’s take on this, according to legend)– Remember: Capitalize the first word after a colon.– Try to not split your infinitives.– Don’t be so immodest as to say I and John left; say Johnand I left instead.– Impact is not a verb.Prescriptive vs. descriptive• In general, prescriptive rules are pretty much justa “secret handshake” to allow educated people toidentify each other. They tell you how to modifywhat you would have said in order to conform tothe convention.– (Incidentally, rules like “don’t split an infinitive” and“don’t end a sentence with a preposition” have theirhistorical roots in a belief that English was inferior toLatin, and was an attempt to make educated Englishmore Latin-like…)3Prescriptive vs. descriptive• Descriptive rules are not rules that you weretaught, not rules that you would generally knowhow to articulate (until you study Linguistics), butthey are rules which people nevertheless seem tofollow (and therefore know).• Descriptive rules are scientific hypotheses; we canonly know that they are right by seeing what therule would predict and checking to see if thepredictions are borne out.Prescriptive vs. descriptive• If our goal is to determine what a person’ssubconscious knowledge of language is, we willnot learn anything by studying prescriptive rules(what the person was taught)—we need toaccurately describe their linguistic behavior (andthen hopefully come to understand why thelanguage system is like this).• Among the most important linguistic behaviors weaim to capture in our description are linguisticintuitions—knowing whether a sentence or a wordis “part of the language” or not.How do people know thesethings?• Every native speaker of English knows thesethings; they have the same intuitions about thepossibility vs. impossibility of these sentences.• No native speaker of English was taught (growingup) “You can’t question a subject in a complementembedded with that” or “You can’t use a propername as an object if the subject is co-referential.”• But they know it anyway…Grammar is a system• What people eventually end up with is asystem with which they can produce (andrate) sentences. A grammar. Even if you’venever heard these before, you know whichone is “English” and which one isn’t:16) Eight very lazy elephants drank brandy.17) Eight elephants very lazy brandy drank.Many kinds of linguisticknowledge• Syntax. Knowing what sentences are English andwhat sentences are not.• Phonology. Knowing that *pnick is not a possibleEnglish word, but that snick is.• Morphology. Knowing how to form words out ofsmaller parts, e.g., antidisestablishmentarianism(anti+dis+establish+ment+ary+ian+ism)predictable from the meaning of establish and aknowledge of morphology; like reteachability orxeroxification. Knowing that you say impossiblenot *unpossible.Many kinds of linguisticknowledge• Lexicon. Knowing the word for apple, knowingthat learn is a verb, …• Semantics. Knowing what’s wrong with Thatbachelor is married, knowing that We havesomething for everyone can mean either ‘there issomething we have that everyone will like’ or ‘foranyone you mention, we have something (perhapsdifferent) for that person’ but Someone said thatJohn bought everything can’t mean ‘for everything, someone said that John bought that